IS THERE A CURE FOR ANTI-SEMITISM'
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was greeted by many Jews as a very hopeful and optimistic development,
and which in many ways I think the United States more than any other
country is built on (at least in a creedal sense), then in Europe, at least, it
was certainly ambiguous with regard to the Jews.
If
we only think of the
example of Voltaire, as one among many, we could say, to sum it up in
a one-sentence formula: if in the past Jews had been persecuted because
they were supposedly the
killers oj God,
from the time of the
Enlightenment and in the name of European rationalism or even human–
ism, they were to be denigrated and stigmatized as the
creators oj
the
monotheistic
God,
as being responsible for the barbarous "superstition"
called revealed religion which the French
philosophes
wanted to
eliminate.
By the nineteenth century, which is the time when anti-Semitism as a
distinct ideology first emerges (although the phenomenon had clearly
existed for two millennia), what we see is the secularization and politi–
cization of a multilayered and well-embodied stereotypical structure that
had originally grown out of a systematic theology and the spiritual
domination of the Church. Therefore, despite the weakening influence
of the Christian churches in modern secular society, many of the domi–
nant stereotypes that had been developed over centuries persisted. They
simply changed their mode of expression, their form and structure, be–
coming more worldly. But there was also something new that happened,
which I think has important consequences to the present day. As the
Jews emerged from the ghetto, they began in Europe to enjoy the fruits
of emancipation, at least once they had entered into European society
which had previously segregated and looked down upon them.
Persecuted in the past, they were now free and equal citizens before the
law, something that was not truly accepted in
social
reality and certainly
not on an emotional level, by the majority of citizens in Europe.
Something else also happened. As the Jew assimilated into modern
bourgeois society, he became a kind of symbol and metaphor for all
those aspects of modernity which many declining groups in society re–
jected, resented, or were fearful of To me, one of the most significant
and important aspects of anti-Semitism, which exists from its inception, is
precisely its power of symbolism: the Jew as metaphor, the Jew as an ex–
traordinarily elastic abstraction. The persistence of anti-Semitism derives
its force from this ability to separate certain attributes from the concrete
living Jew, which are then applied in a universal way to all those phe–
nomena which a particular individual, group, nation, or a whole culture
does not like or cannot live with. The Jew then becomes a barometer
and a touchstone for all those anonymous forces, especially
111
a
"rootless" modern society which are loathed and rejected.
